Original subtitles

It does now seem like

that sometime in the last couple of days

there's been perhaps the worst accident

in the short history

of the world's nuclear power industry.

In Moscow, Western diplomats have spent the day

trying to get more information

about the accident with no success.

A zone with a 19-mile radius around Chernobyl

remains a poisoned no man's land.

Soviet television tonight accused the western media

of spreading slanderous inventions

about the Chernobyl accident.

It's now clear that the Soviet Union

has suffered one of the worst disasters

in the history of nuclear power.

Massive quantities of radiation

have apparently been released in an accident

at the Chernobyl Power Station in the Ukraine.

The Soviet version is this,

one of the atomic reactors

at the Chernobyl Atomic Power Plant

in the city of Kyiv was damaged

and there is speculation in Moscow

that people were injured and may have died.

The Soviets may have been fairly quick

to acknowledge the accident

because evidence in the form of mild and nuclear radiation

have already reached beyond the Soviet borders

to Scandinavia.

There are indications

the accident could have happened

several days ago.

It would take that long

for radiation to drift to Scandinavia

and to make the political decision

to announce it.

You can be sure

that the decision to, to disclose

was made at the very highest level,

undoubtedly by Gorbachev himself.

The Soviet press is paying

signally little attention to the disaster.

Newspapers carry only

the brief official announcement

inconspicuously placed.

People have noticed the small paragraph

but seemed unaware of the potential dangers.

People in the cities, towns, and villages

of the Ukraine

just haven't been told

what dangers they may face.

On the eve of the Seven Nation Summit in Tokyo

both Mrs. Thatcher and President Reagan

have urged the Russians to say more about Chernobyl.

Meeting with Italy's Premier Craxi,

Mr. Reagan was demanding answers from the Russians.

Come forward and tell everybody exactly what happened.

You can hardly call this kind of an accident an internal affair

when other countries are threatened

with the fallout of ra...

dangerous radioactivity.

A report in this morning's

Communist party newspaper "Pravda"

indicates that the fire at the power station

still may not have been put out

ten days after it started.

The newspaper says there was an explosion

followed by two fires at the plant.

The "Pravda" pays tribute to the firemen whose efforts

it says limited the scale of the damage considerably.

"Brave bold men" it calls them,

fighting courageously,

hardly able to breathe for soot and smoke,

their boots sticking in the asphalt

melted by the high temperatures.

As an American I'm very privileged

to be able to represent

in the Soviet Union the concern of Americans.

We have agreed

to a joint Soviet-American effort in this regard.

Until the accident, there were 50 nuclear reactors

operating in the Soviet Union

generating 11% of that nation's electricity.

Most of the larger Soviet plants

differ in design from US reactors.

The major difference is

most Soviet nuclear plants do not have

containment buildings,

the thick concrete dome structures

Americans are used to seeing built around US reactors.

When the worst American nuclear accident occurred

at Three Mile Island,

most leaking radiation was kept inside

the containment building.

If as seems to be the case there was no containment

around the reactor as is the general...

Can we be sure of that? What do you...

I do not, I do not know.

Do you think there's a containment building?

I don't think that there is a containment building

because the policy of Soviet atomic constructors

was that the reactor's absolutely safe

and so there is no need to have this kind of precaution

because it indicate possibility of disaster

which Russian always con-considered,

uh, absolutely impossible.

So going to be clear about this, you're, you're going

as far as to say you think it almost certain or just probable

there was no protective shield around this reactor

which appears to have melted down?

No, I think that there is no protection,

protection shield around this reactor's

certainly the case,

because the building as such indicate

that there is no shield.

Walter Patterson, if that is so,

what is the danger to life?

Well, obviously if radioactivity got as far as Scandinavia,

how long, however long it took to get there,

a great deal must have escaped close to the site.

What has been remarkable is how much the Soviet people

in spite of all the evidence still seem to be believing

the fairy stories the government is still telling them.

It could be argued, Martin,

that only the Soviet Union could have kept a lid

on what might have been a situation of public panic,

only a totalitarian state could have got away with it.

I'm not sure they have got away with it.

Sunday's outbreak of fighting

is only the latest in four months of violence

in the tiny Caucasian republic of Georgia.

Spasms of unrest in the Soviet Union

were felt in the southern republics

of Azerbaijan and Armenia.

The rebellion against Communist authority

has now spread

and there's almost certainly more trouble to come.

The decision to send in troops

was taken by President Gorbachev.